On a balmy autumnal evening in October 2001, a secret task force assembled by the CIA and the Pentagon met in a nondescript concrete-and-glass corporate building at the end of Fiji Way, a run-of-the-mill thoroughfare 20 miles west of Los Angeles. That task force, however, was anything but run-of-the-mill. Dubbed the Entertainment Industry Task Force, it comprised 30 of Hollywood’s most renowned filmmakers and creatives, including household names such as Oliver Stone (Platoon), David Fincher (Fight Club), and Randal Kleiser (Grease). Their mission was to imagine the next devastating terrorist attack, mere weeks after the 11 September 2001, attacks set fire to the Manhattan skyline and shook the world.
‘We actually collected a bunch of Hollywood screenwriters’, recalled former Deputy CIA Director John McLaughlin, ‘and said, “Okay, for the next three hours, we want you to be terrorists. Make a terrorist movie for us.”’ The task force was assembled to address the assumption held by many policymakers and analysts that at the core of why 9/11 happened was a failure of imagination. This assumption was, and remains, false.
The truth is more damning than a failure of imagination. Far from failing to foresee a black swan event, the US intelligence community and American policymakers acted out of bureaucratic negligence, complacency and incompetence in the lead-up to the 11 September attacks. The source of failure was not the inability to imagine the atrocity. It was failing to identify terrorism as the state’s most acute security threat and to take proportionate security measures.
The warning signs of a large-scale terror attack had been evident since the December 1992 bombing of a hotel in Aden, Yemen, which hosted US Army personnel. Yet American policymakers wilfully ignored them. Between February 1993 and October 2000, there were eight terror plots, verifiably attributed to al-Qaeda and its operatives, attempted or planned against the United States, including a successful truck bomb detonation in the basement parking lot of the World Trade Centre eight and a half years before 9/11.
Given al-Qaeda’s trajectory from 1992, 9/11 was preventable but for several lapses. In 1997, the Gore Commission, which explicitly warned that ‘terrorist attacks on civil aviation are being directed at the United States’, urged the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to coordinate more closely with the FBI, yet it did not adopt the Tipoff watchlist, the State Department database of individuals involved in terrorist activities. So, when Ahmed Ressam, a known al-Qaeda affiliate, was planning to blow up LAX in December 1999, he wasn’t flagged. Instead, the plot was thwarted by chance when a customs officer, suspicious of Ressam’s demeanour, detained him at the Canadian border and searched his car.
The Gore Commission also recommended that the FBI assign more agents to counterterrorism. This was an opportunity for the Bureau to shed some of its institutional resistance to the discipline, an institutional shortcoming that was well documented in Stanford University political scientist Amy Zegart’s acclaimed book on the US intelligence community’s cultural pathologies, Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11. By September 2001, Zegart’s research revealed that only six per cent of FBI personnel worked on counterterrorism, and most intelligence analysts lacked the requisite qualifications.
To make matters worse, a prevailing culture of regressive thinking was pervasive at the Bureau, with officers holding counterproductive views like ‘real men don’t type’. Arrests, not analysis, were how they prevented attacks. This overzealous mindset shaped the Bureau’s response even in August 2001, when it arrested al-Qaeda operative and would-be twentieth 9/11 hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui for displaying suspicious behaviour, as he wanted ‘to learn how to take off and land a Boeing 747’, without having had prior flying experience. Arresting Moussaoui too early exposed a lack of strategic foresight and closed any chance of using him to develop further leads. The short-term satisfaction of the arrest came at the cost of a longer-term opportunity to disrupt the 9/11 plot.
The Bureau’s other major lapse was its failure to prioritise the Phoenix memo of July 2001, in which agent Kenneth Williams warned that al-Qaeda was sending terrorists to ‘train at flight schools in the US.’ It was clear, as per the memo, that al-Qaeda was laying the groundwork to execute an operation that involved the hijacking and weaponising of aircraft.
Declassified presidential briefs from February to May 2001 carried articles titled ‘Bin Laden’s Interest in Biological, Radiological Weapons’, and ‘Terrorist Groups Said to be Cooperating on US Hostage Plot’. In June 2001, a CIA report raised concerns about an al-Qaeda attack on US soil and warned that ‘something very, very, very big is about to happen.’ On August 6, 2001, five weeks before the infamous attacks, President Bush was handed a Presidential Daily Brief titled ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.’
It was the 36th Presidential Daily Brief item that year concerning Bin Laden or al-Qaeda, and the first to focus explicitly on the threat of an attack on American soil. Even in the weeks before the world-changing atrocity took place, the warning sirens continued to fall on deaf ears. This is evidence of the wilful ignorance that permeated Washington’s perception of the terrorism threat for the better part of a decade. Then disaster struck twice that September morning. Instead of immediately reassessing policy failures and examining flaws in the United States’ hierarchy of national security priorities, CIA Director George Tenet pivoted to an approach focused on imaginary events rather than confronting why the real ones had just happened.
First, the Red Cell was formed on 12 September 2001. It was a unit of eccentric analysts already working within the intelligence community. ‘The Red Cell was an interesting experiment. We took the most adventurous thinkers in the agency, the real eccentrics; we put them in a room and told them to think like terrorists,’ recalled McLaughlin. Tenet’s orders to them were straightforward: ‘tell me things others don’t and make [senior officials] feel uncomfortable.’
Then, Hollywood was summoned. According to Steven E. de Souza, who co-authored the popular action movies Die Hard and Die Hard 2: Die Harder, Pentagon officials gave the task force the following directive: ‘We’ve got our people thinking in channels that we’re trained to think in. We want some left-field, off-the-wall ideas. Say the craziest thing that comes to mind.’
Forming a task force of moviemakers and scriptwriters to dream up doomsday scenarios to prevent them, in the wake of a preventable doomsday scenario, clearly signalled Washington’s desperation. As Michael C. Frank, the scholar and author of The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism in Public Discourse, Literature and Film, poignantly observed: ‘the assumption that the power of the imagination is a crucial weapon in the fight against terrorism may help to explain why Washington sought the advice of Hollywood…[but] one would assume that the creation of “plausible” scenarios requires at least a minimal familiarity with the perpetrators and the circumstances of their violence.’
American policymakers knew that the threat posed by al-Qaeda was serious and deadly
Despite being elevated to the status of national security experts, little is known about what Messieurs Stone, Fincher, and co. actually came up with as potential terror attacks. Equally puzzling is why those 30 moviemakers and screenwriters were chosen for the task force, rather than others. De Souza wrote movies featuring scenes involving terrorists and renegade militias. That doesn’t make him a terrorism expert, but it certainly gives him an edge over Randal Kleiser, who directed Grease. Twenty-five years after the 11 September 2001, attacks, perhaps it’s finally time we got more clarity on Washington’s most bizarre post-9/11 experiment.
In 2004, the 9/11 Commission delivered its report on the causes of the al-Qaeda attacks. It made the following diagnosis: ‘imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies.’ Despite mounting evidence, the failure of imagination framing remains the prevailing explanation among the foreign policy establishment and the intelligence community for why 9/11 happened. Yet, as CIA Director George Tenet warned in a December 1998 memo, ‘we are at war with Osama Bin Laden.’
Prior to 9/11, American policymakers knew that the threat posed by al-Qaeda was serious and deadly. They simply failed to act adequately. According to a December 2001 Senate Hearing on the Global Reach of Al Qaeda, the Islamist terror group’s attacks on US interests between 1990 and 2000 killed at least 81 Americans, including six in the truck bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993. After 9/11, policymakers finally took the threat seriously but did not know how to respond. A failure of imagination did not lead to 9/11. The real failure of imagination came afterwards, when Washington turned to Hollywood to do its thinking for it.
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